e Christian had to
choose between the world and the Master. The battle was fierce and
cruel. Gone now was the consciousness of strength, the dignity of the
patrician! Here was but a lonely wretched human creature fighting the
tempter for his own soul.

He cowered on the ground, the while driving rain beat against the tawny
masses of his hair, and lashed the proud stiff neck that found it so
difficult to bend. The tearing wind searched the loosened folds of his
mantle and the purple silk of his tunic, the emblem of patrician rank.
His face was buried in his hands, heavy sobs shook his broad shoulders.
The face of Dea Flavia, exquisitely fair, smiled at him through his
closed lids, the warm, mellow masses of her hair entwined themselves
around his tear-stained fingers, her cooing voice called to him with the
ineffable sweetness of love.

Christian, it is thine hour! and the battle must be fought out in
anguish and in loneliness, with no one nigh thee to comfort and to
succour, with no one to see the rending of thy soul or the slow breaking
of thy love-filled heart.

"When thou art lonely and wretched," Dea Flavia had cried in the agony
of her wounded love, "call on thy god then and thou wilt find him silent
unto thy prayer and deaf unto thy woe."

And the cry was wrung out from the depths of the tortured heart: "Oh,
God, my God, if Thou be willing take this cup from me!" whilst the man
prayed to his God to take his soul into His keeping ere it became
perjured and accursed.

But God was silent, because the soul, though racked and tempted, was too
great for the tasting of an easy victory. God was silent, but He saw the
tears that fell heavy and hot upon the ground. He was silent, but He
heard the cries of anguish, the bitter moans of pain.

Christian, this is thine hour! for when thy soul and heart have suffered
enough, when they have been weighed in the crucible of divine love and
not been found wanting, then will the peace of God which passeth all
understanding descend in exquisite comfort upon thee.

Gradually the tears ceased to fall, the sobs to shake the massive frame
of the kneeling man. His hands dropped from his face and his gaze went
up to the storm-tossed firmament, there where land and sky merged in the
grey mists of approaching evening.

And on the horizon, as he gazed, beyond the valley, beyond the Aventine
and the murmuring Tiber, already wrapped in gloom, a ray of golden light
had rent the lowering